To ask someone to explain how Philpott could claim 60k?

I should start by saying that I usually ignore the headlines in the Daily Fail about people who are able to claim mind-boggling amounts of benefits as I believe such cases are few and far between. However, I can't help but question the numbers being widely quoted in the press today.

I have seen figures of between £1,000 and £2,000 a month quoted as being the loss in child benefit Philpott anticipated if his ex got custody of their 5 kids. This suggests child benefit is between £40 and £80 per child per week, which it obviously isn't.

I thought unemployed people could claim £53 per week, so even if he was able to also get child benefit for 11 kids, this doesn't add up to 60k. Both the women were working as cleaners, so not sure what other benefits they would get (and be forced to hand over to him).

I know he was getting housing benefit, but they were living in a 3 bed house in Derby, so surely the rent couldn't have been that much.

I know he is a dreadful individual and he clearly had made a decision to live off the state and the women he manipulated, but is there actually any truth behind the figure of 60k or has this been plucked out of thin air?

How much do you need to earn before you don't qualify for housing benefits? I don't know about this area but I thought housing benefits went down as your income went up - and the threshold was low to not qualify.

We are in London so rents are high. Dh earns 22k, but the rent on a two bed flat here is £1400 per month, so we get help. If he earned that amount and we lived in a much cheaper area of the country, I doubt we would qualify for HB at at all.

Channel 4, which actually attempts to do fact checking, came up with a possible 55k, mainly from child tax credits. I don't know much about these but on the website it says you don't need to be working and can get up to £2,690 per child and £545 per child is the basic amount. Someone should just kindly leak what they were actually getting so the debate could be slightly more reasonable.

From the Telegraph article: "the court was told he lost £1,000 a month when his lover Miss Willis left him."

Or £12k/annum. IF Mairead brought in a similar income with her tax credits, and IF all other numbers in that Torygraph article were correct, that suggests household income of£12k Mairead£12k Lisa£8k child benefit£8k housing benefit (assume this didn't depend on Lisa+kids being there)?school dinners equivalent (£100 week, £4k/yr)

They would get about £65 a week per child made up of child tax credits and child benefit, possibly £200 in wages assuming both women worked 16 hours a week, plus about £100 working tax credit, housing benefit and council tax benefit probably at least £120.

So with 11 children living in the house that would be well over £1000 a week cash, plus other benefits like free school meals.

I read something about how they came to that number last year it listed school meals, prescriptions, glasses, healthy start vouchers, something about cold weather payments (I thought they were for pensioners) and school uniform payments (also haven't heard of that) and a whole host of other things. I'm on the mn app just now so can't trawl the net for it but its online somewhere.